Our struggle is to bring social, political, and economic justice to our nation. This is an effort of the Chicano/Mexican American Digital History Project. https://sites.google.com/site/chicanodigital/

Friday, March 07, 2014

Immigrant Women's Lives- International Women's Day

Exploring Immigrant Women's
Lives on International Women's Day

On March 8, we celebrate International
Women’s Day (IWD) – a holiday that originated in the United States and was
later codified by the Socialist International in 1914. IWD reminds us that the
struggle for women’s rights and liberation is an international struggle. This
International Women’s Day we should remind ourselves of the role played by
immigrant women in the U.S. These women, our ancestors, came seeking a better
life. They got jobs as maids and nannies, in factories and on farms. Too often
they were disdained by the immigrants who had preceded them. The same is all
too true today.

Last fall I attended a
webinar that featured DSA Honorary Chair Gloria Steinem. The webinar was
sponsored by We Belong Together, “an initiative of the National Domestic Workers
Alliance and the National Asian Pacific
American Women’s Forum, with the participation of women’s organizations, immigrant
rights groups, children, and families across the country.” Steinem noted that
“Historically, globally, it is women who have been on the road. If you look at
refugees, migrants, those who are affected by conflict and need to find work
and move for a better life, the majority have been women. Immigration is a
women’s issue, and we need to change consciousness to help people understand
this truth.”(photo. D Bacon)

Not long after the webinar,
I got an email from the Ellis Island foundation asking me to "celebrate my
family’s arrival to America." Yet many people who will respond to that
email do not want to celebrate any new arrivals to the US, rather they demonize
them. The images of immigrants today are generally like these:

Terrorists from the middle east
who are coming to America to kill people

Men climbing across barbed wire to
sneak into the US from Mexico and steal jobs from hardworking Americans

Men coming to the United States to
sell drugs

Almost all portray men
coming to do nefarious things. Groups like FAIR work hard to promote those
negative images of immigrants.

But who are the real
immigrants? According to We Belong Together, more than half of the immigrants
to the United States are women. Almost two-thirds of them work outside their
homes – often in the homes of others. Children make up another quarter
(approximately) of immigrants. Here are some of their stories from the We
Belong Together website:

María came to the U.S. ten years
ago on a six-month visa as a companion for a woman with a disability who needed
live-in care. Upon arrival, she was told she was not allowed to leave the
house, she was given only a cot on which to sleep, and received no pay for
months.

Susan is a National Guard Captain
and student body president of JFK University. The daughter of a Japanese
dad and an American mom, she fell in love and built a home with an
immigrant woman. However, when her partner Zaina’s student visa runs out
she is unlikely to get an employment visa.

Yasmin is a law student and human
trafficking survivor from Bangladesh. Yasmin was trafficked to the U.S. by
her father, a white American with a Ph.D. Many of Yasmin’s relatives (many
of whom were children) were held against their will, raped, and beaten.

Adriana is a domestic
violence survivor who was afraid to call the police when her husband
abused her, because of her immigration status and her husband’s threats to
report her to immigration officials. He eventually did report her, and
Adriana was detained for four months.

These are the real
immigrants coming to the U.S. today. Yet too often the immigration reforms that
are proposed do not address many of the issues these women face. We need to
support policies that will support and strengthen women immigrants. Of course,
some of the current proposals do benefit women immigrants, but that’s not true
of all of them.

The proposal put forward by the White
House, for example, has four main elements:

Continuing to strengthen border security

Streamlining legal immigration

Earned citizenship

Cracking down on employers hiring undocumented workers

Perhaps the most
significant of these is streamlining legal immigration. The White House
proposal includes programs to keep families together. This has the potential to prevent the
separation of parents and children as well as allowing same-sex couples to seek
a visa based on their relationship. And the focus on humanitarian concerns
includes victims of domestic violence as a protected group. At the same time
programs to streamline immigration often focus on entrepreneurs, investors or
those with advanced science, technology, engineering or mathematics diplomas.
Such a focus will often leave out many women immigrants.

The proposal to crack
down on employers includes a provision to protect all workers right to
organize. While that might protect the rights of many women now working in
slave shop conditions, how would it affect many immigrant women who are
domestic workers?

Because so many women
immigrants do domestic labor, proposals that link eligibility for citizenship
to proof of work leave out many women. Without the work that these women
perform, other work would simply not get done. So proposals for immigration
reform must include a path to citizenship or legalization that recognizes the
contributions of women’s work and women workers.

A fair immigration policy
would protect women on the job. Only one- quarter of all employment visas are
given to women as principal holders. Yet women workers perform necessary work
from housekeeping to child care as well as high tech jobs. Sexual harassment on
the job and exploitative working conditions place an additional burden on women
workers.

Breakthrough also focuses on women and
immigration issues as part of their mission to make violence and discrimination
against women and girls unacceptable. They, like "We Belong Together,"
highlight the impossible choices women face like whether to stay with an
abusive partner or risk deportation.

Many survivors of violence
– be it domestic abuse or on the job – are also forced to stay silent in
dangerous situations because they are dependent on the sponsorship of an
abusive spouse or employer. In many cases these women fear deportation if they
go to support organizations, local police or immigration agents. Ineffective
immigration laws allow human traffickers to exploit women.

This International Women’s
Day let’s celebrate the immigrant heritage that many of us share by honoring
today’s immigrant women – by supporting fair and just immigration reform. Such reform must protect families and working people and ensure
that women are included fully in any reform. In a nation that values liberty
and justice for all, we cannot continue to put into practice laws that harm
families and punish aspiring Americans.